Around 12 million people in India have no proper cooking arrangements. The situation is worse in urban India where around seven per cent of households lack cooking arrangements while in rural India over one per cent of households is deprived of the facility.

The facts were revealed by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report based on the 68th round of survey. Maharashtra (3.8 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (2.7 per cent) are the top two states which reported “no cooking arrangement”, the survey says.

According to the report, the situation has worsened over the years. It says that 0.7 per cent of rural households lacked any cooking facility in 1993-94 which touched 1.3 per cent in 2012.

Similar is the situation in urban India where 6.3 per cent households did not have cooking arrangements around 20 years ago, but now the figure has reached 6.9 per cent.

The report says, “The proportion of rural households having no cooking arrangement shows a steady increase from 0.7 per cent in 1993-94 to 1.6 percent in 2009-10, but it marginally decreased after that. In this respect, there is no clear trend in urban areas, but the phenomenon of no cooking arrangement is seen to be considerably high.”

In urban areas, the highest proportion of households lacking cooking facility were seen in Karnataka (13.9 per cent), Tamil Nadu (9.2 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (9.1 per cent), according to the report.